Among the information released by the DCMS Select committee from the whistle blower Christopher Wylie is a legal memorandum (it's on page 88 HERE) to the Trump campaign about the use of foreign nationals in US elections. Basically, it's prohibited. But I note on the Kanto Systems offer (page 107) it quotes a support package of £4500 per month for "UK based front and back-end support and technical assistance".
American law is apparently quite specific about foreign nationals in elections. This is what it says :
"Foreign nationals [..] may not play strategic roles including the giving of strategic advice to candidates, political parties, or independent expenditure committees."
And about Alexander Nix:
"However, because Cambridge is currently being managed day to day by Mr. Nix, in order for Cambridge to engage in such activities Mr. Nix would first have to be recused from substantive management of any such clients involved in U.S. elections, and could only participate in ministerial functions, which could include overseeing billings, resource allocation within the company, etc."
It will be interesting to see what happens to CA and Alexander Nix in the US investigation.
Conservative Home (HERE) has picked up on a retraction in The Observer about some of the claims made in their reporting of the CA story. It's of the "we did not intend to suggest" variety. The actual retraction says:
we are happy to clarify that we did not intend to suggest that AggregateIQ is a direct part and/or the Canadian branch of Cambridge Analytica, or that it has been involved in the exploitation of Facebook data, or otherwise been involved in any of the alleged wrongdoing made against Cambridge Analytica. Further, we did not intend to suggest that AIQ secretly and unethically co-ordinated with Cambridge Analytica on the EU referendum…’
Listening to some of the allegations that Wylie made last week I am not sure the retractions are actually necessary but The Observer legal team clearly did.
As far as I read, the telephone number of SCL Election's (CA's parent company) Canadian office and Aggregate IQ were the same. It would be strange for two separate companies to share a telephone number but not impossible I suppose.
As for exploiting Facebook data I'm not sure The Observer has said as much but it's the obvious question isn't it. No doubt the Information Commissioner's Office of the Electoral Commission will discover what happened. The whole idea of AIQs RIPON platform is about targeting voters using a super sample (see below). So, if it wasn't Facebook data and I don't suggest it was, where did it come from?
And finally, the suggestion that AIQ and CA "secretly and unethically co-ordinated" on the EU referendum. Well, I think the allegation is that Vote Leave, BeLeave, The DUP and Veterans for Britain illegally co-ordinated and all used AIQ , which is odd anyway. And the whistleblower claims CA and AIQ were more or less the same company although they may have been legally separate, so it all remains to be seen.
I don't think it's going to change the outcome of the referendum but it will perhaps increase the chances of a vote on the final deal to confirm once and for all that a majority actually want Brexit.
The New Yorker (HERE) has an article about what it was like to be inside SCL and Cambridge Analytica. They explain what a super sample is:
In a “classic S.C.L. project,” the employee explained, the company would use subcontractors, survey companies, and academics in the run-up to an election to create what it called a “super sample.” “We would speak to sixty thousand people, and we wouldn’t say, ‘Who are you going to vote for?’ ” the employee said. “We would say, ‘How do you feel about life?’ ” S.C.L.’s data concentrated on local concerns, such as housing, water shortages, or tribal conflict. “With all of that, we would delineate a strategy for them to win by focusing on targeted groups that we had identified within the population,” the employee said. “It is not so much, let’s make these people do this thing; it is, can we take this thing in such a way that the people who should get it do get it?”
The Facebook data provided a huge "super sample" of the population. The AIQ RIPON platform needed a "super sample" and Cambridge Analytica had access to it at one point. Draw your own conclusion I think.
Update: Facebook has now (April 6th) suspended Aggregate IQ, alleging the improper use of Facebook user's data (HERE). Christopher Wylie has an article (HERE) about why he broke the story in the first place. He specifically raises the question: Did AIQ use data on UK citizens illegally harvested from Facebook - see point 9 in his article. This is the same question InFacts raises (HERE).
There is a video floating around of Dominic Cummings claiming AIQ generated 1.7 billion (yes, BILLION) page hits on Facebook so we are not talking here about something technical or insignificant. Finally, Carole Cadwalladr has tweeted a screenshot (HERE) of the AIQ web page (now deleted) where Cummings says they could not have won the referendum without AIQ.
This story is going to run for a long time yet.
